Devil Wears Prada working the road with Slayer, Slipknot

The Devil Wears Prada rhythm guitarist/vocalist Jeremy DePoyster is in a giggly mood. Touring with this year's Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival with a slew of metal bands has been good to his Dayton, OH-bred band.

"It's going really good," DePoyster told SoundSpike. "We just got done with a signing over at [the] Rockstar [booth]. It's fun to open the main stage for Slayer and Slipknot every day."

In some sense, this tour is easy for DePoyster, who spent a recent jaunt helping create the live CD/DVD "Dead and Alive," which was released on June 26. In addition to the live footage, the DVD features a wide array of behind-the-scenes footage shot and edited by DePoyster.

"We shot one of the shows in Worcester, MA," DePoyster explained. "We brought a film crew out and got the whole show. We decided to do a whole behind-the-scenes segment. I took a bunch of footage I've gathered in the last couple years on that tour, put it together and made a mini soundtrack or whatever for it."

The project was challenging to say the least for DePoyster, whose hard drive crashed while on tour in South America, causing him to lose the entire file.

"The other challenge was trying to find enough interesting footage," he said. "I had so much interview footage with the guys and just shooting myself while being on tour at the same time and playing every day and doing press and meetings and stuff like that, and still being able to shoot, it's a little draining but I enjoyed it."

DePoyster--who is joined in the band by Mike Hranica (vocals), Chris Rubey (lead guitar), Andy Trick (bass) and Daniel Williams (drums)--said The Devil Wears Prada didn't prepare for the Worcester show any differently than it does a regular performance.

"I think that's more on the crew side of things," he said about preparation. "They have to light up the stage a little bit more. But we have to know where the guys are with the cameras and stuff like that and have to work around them.

"The crew was pretty insistent that they were just going to let it be a normal show for us. It really was. For us, at least, it was like any other show. You know, it's not an overly produced thing. It's just the same show we put on every day."

So far, DePoyster said, he has received positive feedback from fans about "Dead and Alive."

"A lot of people are really excited about it," he said. "I'm sure a pretty big majority of people who pick it up have seen us before. Hopefully, it's [a keepsake] for them so they can remember what the show's like. Some of the old songs that are on it translate a lot better these days with the way that we play them than maybe when we did the original recordings back in the day."

The Devil Wears Prada, which is in the preliminary stages of writing a new album, will spend the rest of the month and part of August on the Mayhem tour. Then it will hit Europe and Great Britain with Whitechapel and August Burns Red. In the meantime, DePoyster is getting his fill of Slayer and Slipknot.

"I watch Slayer and Slipknot every night," he said. "Those guys are just throwing it down each in their own way. They have just incredible fans with incredible shows."